Naked Came the Stranger

‘Swimming Home,’ by Deborah Levy

A question for the wives: Let’s say you’ve rented a holiday villa on the French Riviera, and when you arrive, along with your philandering, ­middle-aged poet husband, you discover an attractive young woman, her fingernails painted green, floating naked in the pool. Mightn’t it be a good idea for everyone concerned to ask the rental agent if you can still retrieve your deposit?

Unfortunately for the characters, and luckily for the reader, the wife who has leased the vacation house in “Swimming Home” doesn’t appear to think so. From the first brief chapters of Deborah Levy’s spare, disturbing and frequently funny novel, which was a finalist for this year’s Man Booker Prize, we sense that things will turn out badly — for the nude interloper as well as for the villa guests. We can predict with some certainty that two marriages will be tested, possibly ruined, and that the antique Persian gun will not stay hidden under the bed.

But what we don’t understand for a while is what sort of novel we’re reading. As we begin to settle in among the party of privileged British vacationers — two couples, one with a teenage daughter, all warily eyeing Kitty Finch, the girl who emerges from the pool — we may wonder. Haven’t we seen something like this in an early Chabrol thriller or in that Ozon film with Charlotte Rampling? Don’t the tone and the milieu suggest an improbable hybrid of Virginia Woolf, Edward St. Aubyn, “Absolutely Fabulous” and Patricia Highsmith?

As we continue reading, we realize that “Swimming Home” is unlike anything but itself. Its originality lies in its ellipses, its patterns and repetitions, in what it discloses and reveals, and in the peculiar curio cabinet Levy has constructed: a collection of objects and details that disclose more about these fictional men and women than they are willing, or able, to tell us about themselves.

The girl in the pool is, to say the least, unstable: anorexic, obsessive, a self-styled botanist staying (before and after a stint in a mental hospital) at the holiday property, which is owned by the luxury-real-estate investor for whom her mother cleans house. The object of her current mad obsession is a famous poet, Joe Jacobs, a complicated man with an evasive, unresolved and perhaps unresolvable relationship to his tragic childhood. His journalist wife, Isabel, has spent more time broadcasting from war zones than at home with her husband and her daughter, Nina — who, at 14, is just noticing the effect she has on the French guy who owns a cafe near the villa and prides himself on looking like Mick Jagger. Also staying at the house are Isabel’s friend Laura and her husband, Mitchell, whose reckless spending has accelerated their slide from being the middle-class owners of a London shop selling “primitive Persian, Turkish and Hindu weapons” and “expensive African jewelry” to the edge of bankruptcy and financial free-fall.

Photo

Deborah LevyCredit
Sheila Burnett

Watching from the house next door is an elderly British woman, a doctor who knows just what kind of serpent the tourists have admitted into their garden. But no one heeds the obvious warnings, not even when Laura reports on Kitty’s idiosyncratic approach to home décor: “She had seen Kitty arrange the tails of three rabbits Mitchell had shot in the orchard in a vase — as if they were flowers. The thing was, she must have actually cut the tails off the rabbits herself. With a knife. She must have sawed through the rabbits with a carving knife.”

It is suggested that Isabel has permitted Kitty to stay because she wants her to serve as the missile that will finally torpedo Isabel’s marriage to the unfaithful Joe. And we know, from having read the novel’s opening section, that Kitty and Joe will wind up returning at midnight from making love at the Hotel Negresco, hurtling at high speed along a winding mountain road.

“When Kitty Finch took her hand off the steering wheel and told him she loved him, he no longer knew if she was threatening him or having a conversation. Her silk dress was falling off her shoulders as she bent over the steering wheel. A rabbit ran across the road and the car swerved. He heard himself say, ‘Why don’t you pack a rucksack and see the poppy fields in Pakistan like you said you wanted to?’ ” This passage will be repeated, with additions and variations, elsewhere in the novel. And as we learn more about the characters, we are better equipped to understand what it signifies.

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We may wish that Isabel, with her experience on the front lines, had found a human time bomb less likely to inflict collateral damage on the innocent. But as we read on to discover how grisly the carnage will be, we notice that the book has taken an interesting turn. All sorts of seemingly minor details — an anecdote about a bear, an Apollinaire poem, a pebble with a hole in the middle — turn out to be connective threads in the plot.

Meanwhile, Levy is adding levels of complication that go beneath the sunny surface to get at something darker and more substantial. Among the novel’s concerns are the weight of history and the past, the alarming ease with which mental illness can infect the relatively healthy, the intimacies and estrangements of marriage and family life, the insecurities of youth and the indignities of age. Buying a scoop of caramelized nuts that she half hopes will fatally choke her, the elderly doctor tells herself that “she had turned into a toad in old age and if anyone dared to kiss her she would not turn back into a princess because she had never been a princess in the first place.”

Beneath much of what takes place is the question of what it means to be fraudulent or authentic. In one insightful passage, Isabel reflects on the feeling of being an inadequate actress, improvising a supporting role in the drama of her daily existence. “She was a kind of ghost in her London home. When she returned to it from various war zones and found that in her absence the shoe polish or light bulbs had been put in a different place, somewhere similar but not quite where they were before, she learned that she too had a transient place in the family home. . . . She had attempted to be someone she didn’t really understand. A powerful but fragile female character. If she knew that to be forceful was not the same as being powerful and to be gentle was not the same as being fragile, she did not know how to use this knowledge in her own life.”

Readers will have to resist the temptation to hurry up in order to find out what happens during and after Joe and Kitty’s wild ride along the coast because “Swimming Home” should be read with care. So many of its important events occur in the spaces between chapters that it’s easy to overlook how thoroughly they’ve been prepared for. Our reward is the enjoyable, if unsettling, experience of being pitched into the deep waters of Levy’s wry, accomplished novel.

SWIMMING HOME

By Deborah Levy

157 pp. Bloomsbury. Paper, $14.

Francine Prose’s most recent book is a novel, “My New American Life.”

A version of this review appears in print on November 25, 2012, on Page BR21 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Naked Came the Stranger. Today's Paper|Subscribe